Known in the art is a jigger apparatus used in the textile industry, which comprises a movable cover and a stationary housing accomodating production equipment.
This jigger is mainly deficient in that the production equipment is not easy to service inside the housing. This equipment has to be rolled out of the housing to a special carriage through an opened butt end of the jigger in order to load a textile material, or to clean and repair the jigger. For this reason all coupling of such a jigger to service lines (steam, vacuum pipes, electric cables, power lines, etc.) are made via connectors which should each time be joined and disconnected and checked for tightness. This makes servicing of the jigger time consuming and complicated and, consequently, its operation is made less reliable.
Also known in the art is a jigger apparatus for treatment of textile materials, comprising a base, a cover mounted fixedly on said base, a housing movable along its longitudinal axis in relation to the cover, and production equipment mounted on a frame (cf., advertising material for BX-SUPER-1200XT apparatus manufactured by Vald. Henriksen, Denmark). The production equipment in this apparatus is rigidly secured on the cover since the cover is fixedly installed on the frame. All connecting lines of the production equipment extend through the cover, the housing being without any service lines whatsoever and can be rolled away from the cover on wheels. For the heavy production equipment not to be cantilevered on the cover, the frame is provided with a pair of rollers and the housing with two longitudinal projections whereon the rollers run when the housing is displaced.
This apparatus is convenient in operation and quite widely applied. But it is deficient in that the rigid connection of the frame and production equipment to the cover and of rollers to the frame requires very precise manufacturing processes and through assembly to avoid, during the displacement of the housing, any bending loads which may be destructive to the frame-cover connection. This may be caused by manufacturing faults and errors of assembly when the planes of the housing projections do not match the path of the surfaces of rollers running on these planes. Such a mismatch makes the rollers rise with a certain effort and hang over the projections, loosening the contact therewith, which is the reason for the fracture of the frame-cover joint.
In addition, this construction also requires a thorough adjustment of the cover plane with the housing entrance in order to achieve a perfect fit for further sealing. No assembly adjustments during the operational period could guarantee such a perfect fit which can only be relied on in case every single interacting part, and there are dozens of them, has been precisely manufactured. This precision manufacturing process makes the apparatus and its operation an expensive exercise, to say nothing of the repair costs. But even with the stringent requirements for the precision of manufacturing of parts of the apparatus, bending loads cannot be eliminated and the reliability of the apparatus is affected whether it operates at room temperature or is subjected to environment variations resulting in metal expansion processes.